An impassioned ballad about the unrequited love between an anthropomorphic turtle and the princess of Mushroom Kingdom is shaping up to be a dark horse for Song of the Summer.
With The Super Marios Bros. Movie crushing it at the box office, Jack Black’s “Peaches” has emerged as an unexpected viral sensation. Sung by his character Bowser about Anya Taylor-Joy’s Princess Peach, the piano ballad currently sits in the top 10 of the iTunes streaming charts, while its accompanying video was the fourth most viewed clip on YouTube Music this weekend.
The video, directed by Cole Bennett of Lyrical Lemonade, stars Black dressed in a Bowser-inspired outfit, playing a peach-colored Ludwig piano and dancing inside of a mushroom hut. Watch the video along with a behind-the-scenes clip below.
“Bowser plays an incredible piano ballad that extols his love for Princess Peach,” Super Mario Bros. co-director Aaron Horvath said (via Insider). “As we were trying to get the point across of Bowser’s feelings for Peach, it seemed more fun, funny and sweet if we had [Black] sing a song about it.”
“Jack Black is an incredible singer and musician, so we spent a night writing the song and sent the demo to Jack,” Horvath added. “A couple days later, Jack sent us back a finished track. He had added his own twist on it and his pianist played an original music track for it. We were blown away.”
In its opening weekend, The Super Mario Bros. Movie brought in a massive sum of $377 million at the global box office, including a domestic haul of $204.6 million. Those numbers made for the biggest opening of 2023 to date, and set a new record for a movie based on a video game.
Read our review of The Super Mario Bros. Movie here.